


From Birth

by Trismegistus (Lebateleur)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Jotunn | Frost Giant, Loki Angst, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki Needs a Hug, Loki-centric, Magic and Science, Missing Scene, Thor: The Dark World Compliant, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 15:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10389390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/pseuds/Trismegistus
Summary: Who we are is decided by our parents.  What we become is decided by how we love.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [subjunctive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/subjunctive/gifts).



Frigga sat with her hands folded demurely in her lap. Her handmaidens were arrayed in a half moon around her. Some spun, some embroidered, all speculated ceaselessly about the safety of Asgard's warriors. Throughout it all she kept her head held high and held her peace. For that was the lot of a queen: to take action when necessary and bide quietly, else.

In truth, inwardly she was no calmer than her women. Her mind returned yet again to the eve of Odin's departure. “You have already routed the frost giants once; is that not enough?” she had asked. Odin's hands stayed briefly, then resumed testing the lacing of his armor and the heft of the great sword belted at his side. 

“You know it is not,” he had replied. “Our warriors put Laufey's hordes to flight in Midgard, but the frost giants have merely fled to Jotunheim to lick their wounds. Now is the time for us to press our advantage. Only by defeating them in their own realm can we ensure that they never again grow strong enough to threaten the Nine Realms.”

He paused and met her eyes. “Do not tell me it troubles you, Frigga. For there must be war, if we are to ensure the peace for which you long as much as I.”

She did not gainsay him. The Jotuns' depredations were as well known to her as to any. And Odin's strength and valor were as plain to see now as they had been on the day they first met. In truth, her heart thrilled to it still. Only...

Only, she had hoped he need not leave just yet, not so soon after his return from Midgard, not while their own son was yet so young. As Asgard's queen, she knew her allegiance must ever be first to the realm, but was it so selfish to wish that Odin might forego this chance for valor to remain here?

Odin studied her, head tilted to one side. “My queen does not believe that I will triumph.” His voice was teasing, amused. Beneath the grey hair and wizened features she saw clearly the brash confidence that had so captivated her as he'd wooed her those many centuries ago. Yet with motherhood had come the realization that every life lost was some couple's child.

She kept this counsel to herself, saying only, “Your queen knows your victory is assured. But she will miss you all the same.” As she took him by the hands in farewell, she hoped not that he would lead Asgard's armies to glory, but that he would return to her unharmed; that in time there might be another child, a son or daughter to be friend and companion to Thor. 

Sudden commotion beyond the door startled her from her recollections. She gasped, blood running to ice. But no. Had her worst fears come to pass, Heimdall would have known of it already; would have sent word. This could only mean—a moment later she heard it: the ring of trumpets pealing out in celebration. Asgard's heroes had returned. 

Later that night, as Odin slept beside her, his ardor spent, Frigga rose and slipped from their chamber out onto the balcony. Asgard's moons were twin lights on the horizon, and the bifrost gleamed in multicolored splendor. In the homes and taverns below, Asgard's citizens yet feasted in celebration of their king's return or drank to the memory of the fallen, but no sound of their revelry reached her here. So high above the city, all was quiet, and still. 

She crossed lightly to the fountain that stood in the balcony's center and perched on the lip of the stone ledge that surrounded it. She let her mind wander as it would, idly watching the jets of clear water as they cascaded into the pool at the fountain's base. The ripples they formed made the reflected light of the stars shimmer. 

So much had happened in the last few hours she found her mind could not hold it all. The armsman announcing Odin's presence. The eyes of her handmaidens upon her as she rose to greet him, mindful that she not be seen to rush to his side. How he could not embrace her, for he already held something in his arms.

“Frigga,” he had said, “Come greet your new son.” There had been no time for questions in the chaos that followed; they had had just long enough to wake Thor's venerable old nursemaid to come tend to the infant before hurrying to the throne room where Odin was to proclaim Asgard's victory to the throngs that assembled there.

Suddenly her vision narrowed and sharpened, as though someone had thrown open the windows in a dark room and flooded it with light, and the sound of the fountain receded into the background. She tensed instinctively, then willed the tension from her muscles. It was not often that visions came, but she had learned that when they did it was best to let them run their course without fighting against what they would show her. In the fountain's pool, color swirled and shimmered until she saw not the pinpoint lights of the stars' reflections, but the glitter of millions of ice crystals swirling on Jotunheim's freezing winds. 

She knew she looked through Odin's eyes. 

She watched as he cut his way through Laufey's hordes toward the fortress where the frost giant king made his last desperate stand. Fighting free of the battle raging around him, Odin hastened down long corridors to the throne room. His eagerness to bring this bloodshed to an end thrummed in her veins.

She—Odin—they—burst through the great doors into the throne room. But it was empty; Laufey had fled long ago. Odin gave a cry of rage and her throat burned as though it had issued from her own. 

But the room was not empty—a small, piercing cry answered Odin's angry roar. As she took in more of the surroundings Frigga realized with a sudden skip of her pulse that this was no throne room at all, but a temple. Odin stepped slowly into the room, wary of trickery, to find neither the king he had come to slay nor a clever ruse, but a small Jotun child, abandoned upon the altar stone. 

She sensed Odin's disappointment as he lifted it from the altar, for he had come to slay a king and found naught but a helpless infant instead, left behind as if to taunt him. The babe was small and fretful, the gentle tracery of its veins showing clearly through its blue-grey skin. Frigga's hands flew to her lips, for to touch a frost giant brought only death. Worse still, Odin's heart roiled with anger—at the carnage the frost giants had wrought, at Laufey's escape and his cowardice, at a race that would abandon an infant to its death at the hands of its enemies, or its gods, or to both—and she ached to know that her husband's heart was filled with this rage.

Odin realized his mistake, although belatedly. His hands stilled, tensed in anticipation of the icy death to come. But the babe was too young to know aught but that it had been abandoned and now was not; at the touch of Odin's hands it quietened and eased. Bemusement caught Odin off guard. At that moment the longing that had filled Frigga on the eve of Odin's departure: that the war between their would races end, that Odin would return to her unharmed, that they might be blessed with another child, flowed through his hands and into the child. Through Odin's eyes, Frigga watched in awe as the infant's cold flesh shaded from azure to soft human skin, as it opened its eyes to look upon Odin and smile. 

Many centuries later, Loki lay on his back, on his bed, in his cell in the depths of Asgard's dungeons.

A fight had broken out between two of the prisoners in the cell across the corridor. He sighed and turned his gaze to the ceiling as the guards came running. It was galling to be confined alongside this riff-raff, as though he too were a criminal when in truth he had been born to rule worlds. It was to this that his thoughts ever returned as the months stretched into years: that he was rotting away in captivity when by rights Asgard, Midgard—even Jotunheim—should have prospered beneath his benevolent reign.

To his credit, he did not shy away from reflection, picking apart what he had done and might have done differently so that once he won his freedom from this place—and he would—he would not make the same mistakes again. Odin, so arrogant, so complacent, might think his useless “son” safely locked away for good, but Loki knew he was far cleverer, far wiser, far more perceptive than the Allfather could ever imagine. And while Odin had subjects to deceive, a kingdom to misrule and a wife and son in whose affairs to meddle, Loki's energies and attentions were undivided; moreover, his time on Midgard had taught him the value of patience. He had but one goal and all the time he cared to take to achieve it.

For a moment, the air seemed to bend and twist.

“Hello, Frigga,” he said.

“Loki,” she said at last. “Will you not even rise to greet your mother?” He heard the disappointment and the gentle reprimand in her voice, but was far too wise to be taken in by either. 

“My 'mother?' I thought we established during your last little visit that you are nothing of the sort.” They had argued about the Allfather and Thor, and she had held out her hands and vanished when he sought to place his own within them; the memory yet stung. A corner of his mouth curled. “In fact, I'm surprised you have the time to waste on a mere criminal. Has Asgard truly grown that boring? Set me free and I will quickly remedy that for you.” 

She sighed heavily. The layers of her silken gown rustled as she seated herself upon his chair. “Oh, Loki, you are my son. You always were.”

“Was I your son when Odin took me hostage to compel the frost giants' good behavior?” He spat the question with venom, but Frigga's calm was unperturbed. It was an exchange they had repeated many times already, now more ritual than not.

“I wish I could show you,” she said, continuing to the next part of the script they had established. “How he went first not to great hall to greet the council as tradition demands, but to our chambers, so that he might be a husband and father to you and I before a king to his realm. How carefully he held you in his arms. 

"You were always loved and wanted."

“'You were always loved and wanted.'” It was laughably false, and yet she always concluded her little monologue with this, as though she thought some part of him needed to hear her say it. "'Always loved and wanted.' And yet, your actions prove otherwise.”

Frigga sighed again, and when she spoke next there was a tautness to her voice that belied her calm choice of words. “Our actions do prove it, Loki. If I did not love you, I would not be here now. And if Odin did not love you, he would never have given you this chance to reflect on your missteps, and in time, atone for them.”

He laughed softly, enjoying a quiet sensation of triumph. He so rarely managed to pierce her composure. “Is that what you think I'm going to do, if only I am kept here long enough?” 

She rose, and he heard a dull sound as she set something heavy on the table. Something twisted in his chest. He turned his head at last, but saw not the gilded leather of the Asgardian tomes he'd requested of her, but a stack of Midgardian books, their gaudy covers incongruous in the plain whiteness of his cell. 

His lips twisted in distaste. “Has Odin sentenced me to death by boredom?”

She gave him a long, silent look. “These books tell the story of Midgard, Loki, as written by the men of Midgard.” She paused, and smiled with what might have been compassion or disappointment, or both. “It might behoove you to learn something of the people you intended to rule, for a wise king must love and understand his subjects before he can lead them.” 

For a moment, she seemed about to say something further, then thought the better of it. A heartbeat later the air flickered and she was gone as if she had never stood there at all. 

For weeks, he did not touch the books but lay in his bed, or observed the criminals, or paced his cell, all the while thinking up ever more acidic declarations to deliver about why he had not read them and never would when she next appeared. But Frigga did not return.

Frigga, he thought, could not leave well enough alone. In truth, Loki had no use for her visits, and thought it poor of her to lower herself to making them when the rest of his erstwhile family did not. And yet, her appearances were the only source of variation in the monotony of his confinement, and for that reason only, he resolved at last to do what it would take to have her resume them.

He opened the first book. _...The star that is our Sun arose from a vast cloud of cold hydrogen...widely dispersed atoms gravitated into small clumps...a diffuse cool expanse of indeterminate shape was now a dense, hot, spherical “proto-nebula.”_ He snorted—what use was such knowledge to him—and flipped forward. 

_Some millions of years ago, from the ocean floor at its greatest known depths, mighty volcanic convulsions thrust up above sea level..._ So it was to be death by boredom after all. He glanced briefly at the guards and the occupants of the other cells to make sure he was not observed, then twisted his fingers lightly atop the cheap Midgardian paper. The book seemed to writhe and elongate, but for an instant only. The next moment the volume beneath his hand appeared to be written on proper vellum and bound in soft calfskin. 

Frigga would surely know what he read, but he need not suffer the indignity of anyone else seeing him peruse these fables. He flipped forward again. And then again, until he came upon the chapter that explained the origins of humankind.

He laughed, briefly and without humor, for here he would surely find the evidence to prove humanity's inferiority. If Frigga thought this knowledge would make him regret the measures he had taken upon Midgard, she had sorely miscalculated. 

_Organisms inherit their genes from their parents, and each gene specifies a particular trait,_ he read, and then stopped. And then continued, reading now to comprehend and not merely to mock as unease bloomed within his stomach. Another disturbance was brewing in the cell across from his. He ignored it. _Humans possess 23 chromosome pairs that..._ He paused, staring blindly at his hand lying atop the page while his mind raced.

There was a kind of logic to it, for while he had long known the magics to change form and appearance, the mechanisms by which form was first created obeyed rules of their own. Even he knew that no man with Thor's yellow hair could sire a child with his dark locks, should his mate's hair be equally as golden. And while Asgardians might be as pale as he or possess Heimdall's dark complexion, such things did not occur at random. 

_Heritable traits are passed from one generation to the next when..._ He turned his hand against the page, fingers curling into a fist. Thor had ever been Odin's favorite, but he had once found comfort in the fact that Frigga had chosen to teach her magics to him. All this time he had thought it a mark of her favor, but now he knew it for what it was—a distraction while she wove her spells so that he might appear to all as something he was not. It was a means to disguise his true nature until Odin might make use of him. Now that he knew to look for it, it was only too easy to perceive the cocoon of Frigga's magic that enveloped him even now.

For the first time since that day in the treasure vault when he had discovered what he truly was, he tried to return himself to his true form. Yet Frigga's magic, which had first taken hold of him as an infant, was now so powerful, so much a part of what he was, that even though he strained against it he could barely bend it, let alone dispel it. Try as he might, hers was an enchantment too strong to break, and his skin remained as pale and warm as any Asgardian's. 

He turned his eyes back to the book and continued reading, lips thin and white, until the cries of the other prisoners grew too panicked to ignore. At last he looked up. One of the prisoners was on fire—no, not on fire, but rather burning its way out of the spell that had trapped it in the form of something it was not. Now that Loki knew how to identify such magics, it was plain to see. The prisoner immolated the last remnants of its human costume and tore its way out of the cell. 

He shut his book and rose as around them the guards raised the alarm. The monster stalked across the corridor to stand before his cell. He strode to to meet it, stomach churning with the insult of what had been done to him, feeling that this creature alone among all those in the dungeons or the teeming throngs of Asgard above understood him. For long moments, they considered one another.

“You might try the stairs to the left,” he told it.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear subjunctive, thank you for giving me the chance to play around with these concepts! I hope they're as fun for you to read about as they were for me to write. 
> 
> (NB: Frigga's Midgardian book contains Bona Fide Science Facts mashed up from Dava Sobel, George Sansom, Bill Nye, Wikipedia, and vague memories of high school biology.)


End file.
